


Feels Like Home

by katwithallergies



Category: Adam Lambert (Musician), American Idol RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-12
Updated: 2012-04-12
Packaged: 2017-11-03 13:07:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/381673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katwithallergies/pseuds/katwithallergies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kris has always been a tactile person, and Adam Lambert is a smorgasbord of textures.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Feels Like Home

**Author's Note:**

> This is an older fic that I decided to clean up and post. All mistakes are my own.

The tour bus sways and bump-bump-bumps over an interstate bridge.  Kris feels the knobs of his spine rubbing against the paneled wood wall of Adam’s bunk with the cadence of the road, still awake well into the morning. 

He runs his palm over Adam’s gel-stiffened, feathered-and-teased hair and thinks about the Arkansas grass, dry and crackly in summer under his bare feet as he ran across the pasture under the smell of an oncoming storm. He moves his fingers down to Adam’s pin-striped, cotton pajamas and thinks about the throw that covered the foot of his childhood bed, the one he and Katy had had most of their awkward firsts on.  First real kiss, first time seeing each other naked, first blow job, first sex.  Last sex.

Kris sighs.  Sometimes he can lose himself in a feeling and his mind quiets and he thinks nothing at all.  At other times though, like now, each touch is connected to another time and place and each one pulls the next one with it endlessly like scarves from a magician's sleeve.

Adam snuffles in his sleep and wraps his long fingers around Kris’ fidgeting hand.  Kris feels the smoothness of Adam’s fingers against his calloused ones and thinks about the first time Adam touched him, skin on skin.

 

It was during Hollywood week and they were standing in a crowd listening to a PA explain something for the thousandth time.  Kris was nervous. He’d drifted off into thoughts about the strong possibility of being sent back to Arkansas with nothing to show his wife and family but another failure.

“You like my belt?” Kris looked down and realized that at some point in his meanderings he’d grabbed the tail of Adam’s over-long belt and started brushing the frayed end with his fingers. 

“Oops, sorry!” he said, dropping it.  “I’m really sorry, I- it’s just a nervous habit.”

“It’s ok,” Adam said, all genuine amusement now.  “We’re all really stressed.  It’s Kris, right?”  Kris nodded, too embarrassed to meet Adam’s eyes.  “Here,” Adam said, unlacing his belt. “Why don’t you wear it, for luck.  It’ll give your wandering hands something to do.” Without the slightest hesitation he rucked up Kris’ shirt and started threading the belt around his waist.  He turned Kris by his hips and his thumb brushed the skin just above his jeans, a single ring sharply cold.

Kris felt a little shock run through him and thought, disturbingly, about the first time he kissed Katy.

“Uh, um, I- thanks?” He said as Adam finished and looped the trailing end of the belt though itself till it only reached Kris’ mid-thigh.  “Better it’s on you, some guys might get the wrong idea if you go around feeling up their accessories.”   Adam smiled and then they were being herded on, getting separated by the crowd.

 

“Stop thinking so loud,” Adam said into the darkness their first night as roommates in the mansion.  Kris’ hand stuttered in its progress, shuffling methodically around the hem of his blanket.  He hadn’t been thinking about anything in specific, more like everything at once.  He did this while he waiting for sleep - let the wide weave of the blanket scratch between his fingers.  It was textural white noise, like static on a radio at midnight, and it allowed him to unfocus his brain. 

“I have your belt,” he said, because it was the first thing to emerge from his swirling thoughts.  Adam laughed low and rumbling.

“Keep it, you need it more than I do.”

Kris snorted.  “Yeah, I’ve seen the way your pants fit – those belts are purely for decoration.”

Adam chuckled again, like he was too tired to summon a real laugh.  He was quiet after that and Kris felt his brain go fuzzy again.  This was the one time he could be free of an endless string of thoughts.  He’d always fallen asleep like this, since he was a toddler.  He’d worn the hem off dozens of blankets in five different beds and three bedrooms over the course of twenty years.  The memories of it were non-specific, diffuse.  They couldn’t tie him down. 

Eventually Kris drifted off and his hand began to slow.  On the next bed Adam lay silently and listened to the rasping of fabric-on-fingers fade and stop.  It was hours later before he fell asleep, too.

 

“Check this out,” Adam said, presenting Kris with his hip and a smirk.  It was their first music video day and he was wearing a patent leather belt, it reminded Kris of one of Katy’s Sunday shoes, which reminded him of church and expectations and the shame of never living up.

Kris paused a moment at the strangeness of being in Hollywood, having a gay man sticking his ass out at him, but he wanted to touch it.  He ran his fingers over the slick-smooth belt, interrupted by jean belt loops: bump, bump, bump.

“You like?” Adam asked.

“It feels shiny,” Kris replied, by which he meant ‘yes’.  Adam looked bemused, but understood.

“Good, I wore it for you.  I know you have an affinity for my belts.”  Kris blushed.

 

The judges were mean, no way around it. No one in Conway was mean, and Kris didn’t quite know how to cope.  Every time he came off the stage Kris just wanted to bury his face in something – someone – familiar and breathe deep.  He’d been calling Katy and (not) crying on the phone to her, but he needed more than a voice he couldn’t reach.  He needed to touch something real.  And then Adam was there.

Adam is clanking, tinkling necklaces that were cold on his face where he buried it against Adam’s neck.  He’s a soft leather jacket covered in zippers.  Kris swept his thumb nail up and down the teeth of one.  It bump, bump, bumped. Adam is the corrugated metal on his grandmother’s washboard; Adam is Zydeco music.

Kris shifted his face and chuckled a little bit at that thought. Because Adam most definitely isn’t Zydeco - except in the way that he is.  Because he is a creole, a mix, he isn’t what anyone expects him to be.  Kris realized he’d been leaking slow tears onto Adam’s jacket and moved away, but Adam just held him tighter.

“Leave it,” he said, and Kris did.  One of Kris hands slipped down to the tail of Adam’s sweater where it stuck out past his jacket.  He was wearing cashmere; of course he was. Kris grabbed a handful and thought of home.  Adam is his mother’s apron; Adam is his baby blanket.

The next night, at the weekly goodbye dinner when they were safe for another week, Kris finished eating before Adam and absentmindedly put his hand into the silk-lined pocket of Adam’s jacket.

 

Kris has always been a tactile person, and Adam Lambert is a smorgasbord of textures.  After the first week it had become easy, too easy to touch him all the time.  Kris stroked the knee of his corduroy pants while they watched movies on the couch; he locked one hand around his sleeve, thumb and fore-finger pinching a decorative grommet, while Anoop and Lil walk out of the mansion for good; he rolled Adam’s ring-stacks around his finger and felt metal grind against metal on results day, backstage.  It was easy to get the comfort he drew from the fabrics mixed up with comfort from touching Adam himself.  They were beginning to become one in the same.

 

The bus runs over a particularly nasty pothole and Kris is jolted out of memory.  For a horrifying moment he doesn’t know where he is, but he notes the cramped space and the hum of machinery and the feel of someone distinctly male under him makes him recoil. He’s thinking of locker rooms and the closets at church camp and the top bunk and his best friends’ house and he’s in junior high all over again and he doesn’t know what he’s done.

He realizes slowly where he is and who he is and Adam’s pajamas are tangled in his fingers. And he doesn’t have to worry about closets anymore.  He knows that he was beginning to fade into sleep and curses the driver as he lies down, hand going to Adam’s hair.

 

Katy visited him often, considering that he was in another state, under house arrest and most of America saw him in their living room more often than he could see her.  The first thing he wanted to do when he saw her was bury his hands in her perfect, candy-floss hair.  Adam’s hair is like a tiny, vicious dog.  Katy’s hair is like spider webs.  He let it run out of his hands.   

They went to lunch, security guards in tow, and Katy told him about Conway, said she missed him at home and not having to share him. She wished him success; he thought he must be going away from her, because he couldn't find the peace in her touch.  Adam gave the room over to them for a few hours and after sex Kris traced her collar bone for what felt like forever.  Katy is fine architecture; Katy is the Vatican.  Katy slept beside him, and he wondered where she went.

 

Sometime shortly after one of Katy’s visits Adam introduced him to a metal belt with tiny pieces overlapped like snake scales.  Kris was fixated with it as soon as he saw it.  He groaned at the craziness of being Kris Allen as he excused himself to the bathroom so that it wouldn’t look odd when he dodged Adam’s usual offer to touch it. 

The thought of the metal scales running under his fingers kept springing itself on him throughout the day.  Like a memory of sensation, except one he’d never experienced.  It made his stomach roll suddenly, muted his hearing and stifled his sight and smell.  It was like a bright light; he had to shy away from the sheer volume of the feeling, but he was still drawn inexorably to it again and again.

When Kris dropped his fork for the third time and forced himself again to think of something else he had to laugh at himself.  Because even though this happened to him from time to time, it never got any less ridiculous. 

“What’s wrong with you?” Adam whispered to him, trying to force orange juice on him.

Kris barked a laugh. “Nothing, I’ll be ok.” Adam gave him a doubtful look and kept eating. 

He botched his song half a dozen times in rehearsal before calling for a break.  Adam was backstage, watching with the same frown he’d had at breakfast.  “Come here, take that off.” Kris said, towing Adam into an alcove by his belt.  Adam’s eyebrows disappeared into his hair.

“No, it’s not that,” Kris tried to say, “it’s just I can’t focus unless I get this over with.” Adam’s eyebrows stayed hidden.  Kris sighed.  “It’s your belt.  It’s bothering me.  And I’m not going to be able to think straight until I…” he searched for the right word, “expose myself to it.  I need to de-sensitize.”  Adam’s mouth was moving like there were a million things he wanted to say but he couldn’t decide where to begin.  “It’s a texture thing.” Kris said.

“It always is with you,” Adam said peeling off his belt. Kris took a breath and took the belt from Adam.  He crunched it in his hands, feeling the metal pieces grate and clink.  It felt like being underwater, like being drowned by a wave of sensation, but after a few seconds he could already tell he’d reached the crest of it.  Adam watched him.

“So, you really are just that tactile, huh?” Kris forced his eyes up at Adam, like looking up from the bottom of a lake.  Adam was looking over his shoulder, keeping watch. When he turned back Adam looked like he was considering whole new possibilities, and this was after all the hoopla about the crush, so Kris was pretty sure he had a decent idea what he was thinking. 

In that moment, with sensation clouding his brain, there was very little thought able to occur and everything seemed simple.  He and Katy were (already) in the sunset of their relationship, and somewhere along the way Kris’ comfort had started coming as much from Adam as the things he wore and it was a little bit of junior high all over again.  And somehow, while he waited for a belt to give him back his sanity, that didn’t seem so odd.

After several minutes communing with Adam’s belt he was able to go back out and knock his song out of the park. 

 

When Kris started getting nervous about the prospect of going back to Arkansas for their home visits Adam had thought for a minute and then pulled a bottle of nail polish out of his bag. 

“That place is so small; it’s like breathing inside a paper bag all the time,” Kris tried to explain.

Adam looked up at him from where he was blowing across the top of Kris’ nail to dry the first coat of polish.  ( _“Three coats of polish and a clear coat,” Adam had said, “I’m doing this right.”_ ) 

Kris rubbed his free hand over the bed spread and they sat in silence listening to the swish-swish of it.  “I think maybe I’m changing,” Kris said.  He glanced over at Adam, holding his tongue between his teeth and meticulously painting stripes of polish onto Kris’ thumb.  “Or maybe I’m becoming more of who I always was.”  Adam shook up the bottle of clear coat polish.  “It was easier to keep myself under control when I lived there… the walls are up so close there.  Here it’s different.”

Kris felt the warm metal of Adam’s rings where Adam clasped his hand loosely, holding it still.  The smooth metal exuded its own heat, absorbed from Adam’s skin and Kris thought of being six or seven, climbing on his grandad’s sun-baked tractor in a dry field.  He always felt younger when he was back in Conway.

“I can’t be with you when you go back there,” Adam said, relinquishing Kris’ hand with its neatly painted nail.  “But this way you can carry a little piece of me with you.  Once it’s dry it will be hard and smooth to touch,” he grinned at Kris.  “I have a feeling you’ll like it.” 

And then Adam had leaned toward him and had looked determined and open and Kris had been sure he was about to kiss him when he’d turned his head and pecked him on the cheek instead.  Kris had felt inexplicably disappointed.

 

“How was Arkansas?” Adam asked when Kris returned, bearing one bag and one well-worn painted nail. 

“Homey,” Kris said. By which he meant: ‘good and bad, in unexpected ways.’

Adam nodded.  They’d talked before he left about how he was going to talk to Katy.  While lying on Adam’s bed, rubbing Adam’s chiffon scarf against itself so it made a low sound, Kris had enumerated the issues he wanted to address and Adam had nodded along while Kris worked it out out-loud.  Adam had let the scratching noise be the rhythm for his mantra, about how he wanted Kris’ marriage to work out, really he did.

 

Home had been mostly a blur, his conversation with Katy being the only part that seemed to stand clear.  Katy’s skin was soft like rose petals, like the roses that had been at their wedding, the wedding vows he was probably about to break.  That’s what Kris was thinking when he touched the inside of her arm to pull her aside, late at night in his family’s house.

Katy had been sad, but knowing, when he talked about the distance between them.  She had taken his hand and he felt her ring and thought about her hand on him during their honeymoon. Hard on the heels of that thought came Adam, and his rings.  Kris shook his head. 

“Remember how I said once I might be kind of bisexual?” he’d said, because Kris thinks honesty is the best policy.  Or at least the closest he can get to honesty, because he doesn’t even know.  Katy had looked even sadder then, and maybe a little cross.  She sat down hard on the chair by his bed and the upholstery reminded him of the fabric on the pews at the church camp they both went to, before they were together, where there were closets and boys and demons he meant to bury.  Kris felt himself losing it in kind of a big way. 

But it was ok, because Katy was crying and voicing her own complaints now about how he wasn’t the same person and Kris was perversely glad not to be the only one killing this relationship.  They had angry, tragic sex with his plaid comforter under his hands as he held himself up, familiar and soft. 

He kept feeling the back of the nail Adam painted touch her and it was an odd not-feeling, like when you’re numb from the dentist.  So in a way, Adam was in the bed with him and Katy, and all the people and places and sensations were crashing together for Kris.  He thought _‘if this is the end, it’s like fireworks.’_

 

Kris set his bag by the door and crossed to Adam in the TV room.  He dropped onto the edge of the sofa Adam was stretched out on, looking like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.  Hesitantly he reached forward with both hands and ran his thumbs, one white and one black, over Adam eyebrows, smoothing them outward. 

“Katy said we should give our marriage a break till the end of the competition.”  He obviously wasn’t finished, so Adam waited.  “You feel like home,” Kris said, and petted his thumbs across Adam’s eyebrows once more.  Adam pulled Kris down onto the couch beside him and he settled in to watch the movie, now stroking the hair on Adam’s arm.

“What are you thinking about?” Adam asked. 

“My first puppy.” Kris said, and it was simultaneously the strangest and most genuine come-on Adam had ever experienced. 

 

Kris and Katy had given up on their limping marriage in the downtime between Idol and the tour.  It had gone public immediately and Kris had to stop wearing his ring in public to keep the magazines from painting him tragic. 

Adam had always seen Kris rubbing his ring when he was nervous or distracted, but he never realized how important it was until he saw him falling apart in front of all the media they’d almost gotten used to by now.  Every couple minutes Kris would go to stoke his ring and it was like finding it missing would send a little shock through him and push him a little further out into lost and alone.  His hands were everywhere with nowhere to go, and he looked like he was about to bolt.

Adam sat him down one night and pulled out the familiar bottle of finger nail polish he’d used once before, to great effect.  Kris sat still as Adam stroked smooth lines onto his nail and blew it dry.  Three coats of polish and a clear coat.  Adam felt like an ass for doing this, moving in on Kris and literally replacing Katy while the corpse of his marriage was still warm. But they both knew it was coming, and he couldn’t stand to see Kris looking lost like that, not in if he could help it.

Adam leaned in to kiss him, and this time he didn’t turn away.

 

The bus hits a particularly large bump and Adam’s eyes open, he sees Kris with his chin propped on Adam’s chest, still not asleep, fingers running over and over his painted thumb.  Adam sighs and leans one arm out of the bunk.  He feels around below till he grasps an edge of Kris’ blanket and drags it in on top of them.  He flings it roughly and kicks at it with his feet till it’s more or less spread out.  Kris sighs and grasps the edge. 

“Go to sleep,” Adam says and kisses the top of Kris’s head.  He feels the blanket slowly slither across his chest as Kris shuffles more of it toward himself through his fingers.  The blanket creeps across him and the bus bump-bump-bumps down the highway, but Adam is already falling asleep.


End file.
